LONDON – The European Union's competition chief is getting a new term -- with expanded powers -- in a move that underlines how the bloc's battle to regulate big tech companies is only just beginning. Margrethe Vestager, who angered the Trump administration by imposing multibillion-dollar penalties on the likes of Google and Apple, was reappointed Tuesday for a second five-year term as the bloc's competition commissioner. The Danish politician's tasks will include strengthening competition enforcement in all sectors, stepping up efforts to detect cases of market abuse by big companies, speeding up investigations and helping strengthen cooperation with her global counterparts. Perhaps ominously for the big tech companies that she has cracked down on, Vestager is also getting extra clout. Ursula von der Leyen, the incoming president of the EU's powerful executive arm, promoted Vestager to a commission executive vice-president overseeing the EU's digital innovation and leadership efforts, including artificial intelligence.

The U.K. is currently third in the world for raising investment in AI and second for the number of AI companies in operation during 2019 (Crunchbase data). Still, 89% of the AI ecosystem in the U.K. consists of startups with 50 or fewer employees. Starting is not an issue, scaling is. "For the U.K. to maintain its authority in AI, we need to nurture scalable, globally-competitive, homegrown AI companies that solve real problems. Yet, the pool of AI-focused companies that achieve this beyond Series A remains slim, despite the hype, and the path to scale is uniquely challenging," comments Harry Davies, Applied AI Lead at Tech Nation.

The world's biggest restaurant company is buying startup Apprente Inc., a developer of voice-recognition technology for use in the restaurant industry, to help speed up lines. The idea is to eventually have a machine, instead of a person, on the other side of the intercom to relay orders to kitchen staff. In Chicago-area restaurants where the system is already being tested, employees still oversee drive-thru order-taking and can step in when needed. The acquisition is McDonald's third tech deal in the past six months, and fits into the company's push to lean more heavily on machines and artificial intelligence to boost sales. McDonald's is also using Apprente's headquarters in Mountain View, California--also home to Google owner Alphabet Inc.--to start a tech lab, with plans to add employees there.

Last week, I spoke at the Swiss Mobile Association. The event was held at one of the oldest cross-functional research institutes Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute just outside Zurich. Prior to being involved in IoT and AI, I worked for many years in Telecoms. So, this was a nice time to catch up with a few ideas for AI for Telecoms I believe that from an innovation standpoint – we are living in a post-mobile world. Today, just as the Web itself, Mobile is a mature industry.

Save on the things that will make the school year easier. If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA Today's newsroom and any business incentives. There are few things in life that get me excited in the middle of the workweek--and one of those things is a good deal. The kind of deal that's so good on a product you've been eyeing for a while that it makes you want to shout about it from the rooftop.

KFC is apparently cooking up the world's first Colonel Sanders dating simulator. Is KFC really cooking up a Col. Sanders dating game? It sure looks like it. A new entry on the Steam PC game store entitled "I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin' Good Dating Simulator," promises to let players see if they "have what it takes to be the business partner of and win the heart of the most famous chicken salesman of all time."

THIS WEEK: 6 Lessons Learned 6 Years Into Co-Founding a VC Fund; Drone bubble bursts, wiping out startups and hammering VC firms; State Of AI And Machine Learning In 2019; New Zealand Fund of Funds VC Initiative; First Institutional Round is Redefining VC; How to know when to say'I do' to a term sheet; Should Founders Take the Plunge?; One health care startup at a time, this VC wants to harness the investing power of women; Intel Capital Diversity Initiative; Signia Venture Partners unveils $85 M early-stage fund; Foundation Capital just closed its 9th fund with $350 M; Sony announces a new $185M fund. If you have Venture Capital Firm news (New Fund Announcements, New Partners) to submit for consideration in this digest, submit a link at the end of the newsletter or tweet us at @VCStartupDigest. If you're a fan of our newsletter, please forward this sign-up link to your fellow Venture Capital enthusiasts: http://venture-capital.startupdigest.com/

Whether it's auto-extracting information from a scanned receipt for an expense report or translating a foreign language using your phone's camera, optical character recognition (OCR) technology can seem mesmerizing. And while it seems miraculous that we have computers that can digitize analog text with a degree of accuracy, the reality is that the accuracy we have come to expect falls short of what's possible. And that's because, despite the perception of OCR as an extraordinary leap forward, it's actually pretty old-fashioned and limited, largely because it's run by an oligopoly that's holding back further innovation. OCR's precursor was invented over 100 years ago in Birmingham, England by the scientist Edmund Edward Fournier d'Albe. Wanting to help blind people "read" text, d'Albe built a device, the Optophone, that used photo sensors to detect black print and convert it into sounds.

The graph represents a network of 3,602 Twitter users whose tweets in the requested range contained "futureofwork ", or who were replied to or mentioned in those tweets. The network was obtained from the NodeXL Graph Server on Tuesday, 10 September 2019 at 13:13 UTC. The requested start date was Tuesday, 10 September 2019 at 00:01 UTC and the maximum number of days (going backward) was 14. The maximum number of tweets collected was 5,000. The tweets in the network were tweeted over the 1-day, 19-hour, 17-minute period from Sunday, 08 September 2019 at 04:42 UTC to Tuesday, 10 September 2019 at 00:00 UTC.

The high performance computing (HPC) and big data (BD) communities are evolving in response to changing user needs and technological landscapes. Researchers are increasingly using machine learning (ML) not only for data analytics but also for modeling and simulation; science-based simulations are increasingly relying on embedded ML models not only to interpret results from massive data outputs but also to steer computations. Science-based models are being combined with data-driven models to represent complex systems and phenomena. There also is an increasing need for real-time data analytics, which requires large-scale computations to be performed closer to the data and data infrastructures, to adapt to HPC-like modes of operation. These new use cases create a vital need for HPC and BD systems to deal with simulations and data analytics in a more unified fashion.